I'm not going to regurgitate what has already been said you can read these links if you want to catch up onto speed on what happened.
- Discussion on privacy guides.
- Discussion on fedora project forum.
- Article by Filip Chabik.
- Video by Nicco Loves Linux. - great summary of what happened.
A little bit if my background with Fosstodon.
When I joined Mastodon in late 2018 I joined (number) of servers some which I've lost access too as I didn't really understand how the mastodon social media network actually worked with redirects and whatnot - this was before I did my legal name change as well from Croser to Crozer (yes it's literally just the spelling) but that's a topic for another post. I stumbled upon Fosstodon which is my jam they had a good CoC and privacy policy, a commitment to users that we'd be notified if the instance (server) would disappear so we can all have adequate time to migrate away and most importantly it stood for my stance of FOSS software I mean it's in the name right.
I quite enjoyed my time on the server and the connections I made but then I lost access to the account until recently after this whole drama unfolded which to put it short and bluntly like the person I am - an admin was labelled a fascist - but I want to be clear I wasn't privy to that information in the chats and what the admin in question said and did it's all second hand so read the above links to get the detailed run down of what happened as I don't actually know what the admins stance was but it's not the type of person you want administrating your social media servers. The fallout of all this founders of the instance stepped down Mike and Kev and now it's under new control with Gina overseeing the instance operations.
I quite enjoyed my time on the server and the connections I made but then I lost access to the account until recently after this whole drama unfolded which to put it short and bluntly like the person I am - an admin was labelled a fascist - but I want to be clear I wasn't privy to that information in the chats and what the admin in question said and did it's all second hand so read the above links to get the detailed run down of what happened as I don't actually know what the admins stance was but it's not the type of person you want administrating your social media servers. The fallout of all this founders of the instance stepped down Mike and Kev and now it's under new control with Gina overseeing the instance operations.
Why I stayed and technically rejoined Fosstodon
So I want to first thank Mike and Kev for everything they have done and continue to do for Fosstodon and the open source community, I also want to thank Gina and admin Brandon for assisting me to get back into my old account.
Now with the thanks out of the way (geez this feels like an award ceremony speech 😂) we can get down to business. Now for my views (hot takes if you will) are not going to be for everyone and this blog post is getting quite long so I'm going to try to summarize the rest:
Now with the thanks out of the way (geez this feels like an award ceremony speech 😂) we can get down to business. Now for my views (hot takes if you will) are not going to be for everyone and this blog post is getting quite long so I'm going to try to summarize the rest:
- FOSS or FLOSS should be about exactly that first and foremost as humans we should've evolved enough to put our differences aside and work together for the bigger picture. I don't post about politics on my social media but I'm considered a right wing conservative (more on my political views and personal views here.) My views aren't for everybody but I can get past that and work with people if they don't impose them on their work with FOSS and FLOSS which you'd think we would've evolved as a species to be able to do.
- I'm not one to shy away from controversy as my own personal views can be considered controversial with the vast majority of people in the world not to mention my football team I support in Germany is considered controversial to Germans. So I can put this Fosstodon drama and controversy aside and still support them on Patreon as long as they don't creep in their own agendas and biases, to treat all fairly regardless of personal views and uphold our CoC and server rules.
I guess what I'm trying to say is:
- We should be able to put aside political and personal differences to work openly together on source code. No injecting views into projects and discriminating people who hold different views or values to you. It's about FOSS - just because someone holds different views to you doesn't make them any less of a coder.
- Fosstodon should not have a tarnished name due to one bad actor unfortunately these people do exist you may not even know it but a co-worker you work with could be one of them. Not everyone on the server is bad.
This has pretty much said everything I've needed to say for now there may be a future edit to this post in which a date will be added below to when it was last updated.